


All The Same

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: When You're Going Through Hell, Keep Going [1]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-10
Updated: 2011-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-08 19:38:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3220931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Becker and Morris, 2003 through 2008.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All The Same

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my bingo square ‘chaos and order’, and kindly beta’d by Luka. 
> 
>  
> 
> Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.  
> ― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: Adventure of the Creeping Man

            “He’s going to be fine,” Morris’s mother told her, eyes fixed on her younger child and the young man her older child had brought home from university and embedded in their family, like bedding down a particularly sad-looking perennial in the back garden. Becker was holding Freddie upside down and saying something about little bats, laughing. Freddie was shrieking and waving arms clad in a black hoodie.

 

            They looked like they were having fun, Morris thought. Freddie was only eleven, and not remotely fazed by Becker’s current career plans. Morris was very fazed. Apart from anything else, it had taken months for the Morris family at large to get a laugh out of Becker, and she didn’t want the army to grind them out of him.

 

            “Um, yeah,” she said belatedly, in response to her mother’s remark. “I know.”

 

            Frieda Morris gave her a look so old-fashioned it had probably been used by the architects of ziggurats, and sighed.

 

            “We should probably get a move on,” Morris said hastily, and went to Becker and Freddie.

 

            Becker set Freddie down right away, and ran a hand through his black hair. His brown eyes shone. Morris managed a weak smile in answer. “Time to go?” Becker said casually.

 

            Morris nodded.

 

            The goodbyes at the door were calm and cheerful; they didn’t involve Morris. Morris hopped into the car and waited for Becker to join her instead, not wanting to face her parents’ admonitions about trying not to influence him. They would only ruin her resolve not to do so, and the sneaking guilty feeling that maybe it would be the right thing to do, if she didn’t want to lose him to the lure of a familiar institution and ready-made bonds of friendship made closer than anything else by adversity.

 

            “You don’t have to do this,” Morris said abruptly, halfway down the motorway. “I know your father always wanted you to. You don’t have to do this.”  


            The easy smile fell off Becker’s face. “I’m not doing it for him,” he said. “I’m doing it because it’s what I want.”

 

            Morris’s mouth twisted.

 

            “It’s what I want,” Becker repeated.

 

            Morris swallowed. “Just promise you won’t forget I’m here for you.”

 

            Becker’s hand covered hers on the gearstick and squeezed tightly.  “You’ll always be my best friend.”

 

            The wind howled outside the car. Morris tried to believe what Becker was saying.

  
***

 

            Morris tried to believe what Becker was saying, but it didn’t work, because she was generally preoccupied with being lost and had no time to spare on bolstering belief. “- they’ll like you, I promise,” Becker was wheedling, “come on, just have one drink with us, Max’s brother is here, and Tom’s best mate –”

 

            “Yes, fine,” Morris said, eyeing someone she suspected of being a pickpocket. “But, um, Beck, I’m lost.”

 

            “Where are you?” Becker demanded.

 

            “King’s Cross. You?”

 

            “Get on the Tube to Knightsbridge and I’ll meet you,” Becker said. There was some yelling in the background, and Becker yelled something back, and then there was some laughter, a clattering, a cry of ‘wahey!’, and the phone line cut out.

 

            “That’s a great deal of help, Beck,” Morris sighed, tucked her phone back into her handbag, and stepped sharply out of the way of someone whose questing hand was about to slide into her backpack. “And you can fuck right off out of it, thank you very much!”

 

            “Fucking northerners,” the thief muttered, and vanished.

 

            “I’m from the Midlands!” Morris shouted after him, which achieved nothing other than making her look crazy and stupid. She went inside, bought a Tube ticket, and fed it to the gate, then started to puzzle out her way to Knightsbridge. And what the hell she was going to do when she got there.

 

            Beck was standing waiting for her just outside Knightsbridge Tube, flushed and handsome under the light of the streetlamps, and rocking back and forth on his heels with an exuberance he hardly ever exhibited. His eye lighted on her, and he smiled broadly and opened his arms wide; she ran up the last flight of steps to him and hugged him tightly.

 

            “I missed you,” he said into the bobble of her woolly hat.

 

            “I missed you too,” Morris mumbled. It was perfectly true; Durham was a nice city, and she wasn’t lonely, but she kept turning to look for Becker, opening her mouth to say something to him, buying the things he liked from the supermarket. “Where are we going? Are your friends all pissed already?”

 

            “No,” Becker assured her, letting her go and seizing her hand in a firm grip instead. “Just over-excited. I made them promise to behave. They know all about you. They’re great lads.”

 

            “Really?” Morris said faintly as she was towed down the street past a lot of very posh shoppers.

 

            “Yes, really. When are you coming home for Christmas?” Beck dragged her across the road, down the street and round the corner.

 

            “When I get back to Durham and pack up,” Morris said.

 

            “How was the conference?”

 

            “Um, good. Mostly terrifying. But good. Beck, are you sure -” Morris was dragged into a very fancy bar and pulled to a halt by a table of rowdy young men, all her age, mostly very fit-seeming, all looking very comfortable and as if there wasn’t a space for her. She could see Becker’s abandoned chair, but wasn’t sure where she fitted in here, exactly. Groups of people she could do, although she usually preferred them quieter; these people had nothing in common with her except Beck and she wasn’t sure what to do with them.

 

            “Yes. Cider? Good.” Becker abandoned her.

 

            Morris spun on her heel to see where he’d gone, spotted him insinuating himself to the front of the bar, and gave up on seeing him for a bit. Steeling herself, she turned around and eyed the group with misgiving. Knowing she needed to be on good terms with Becker’s friends, the way he charmed all of hers, she tried a smile.

 

            It was immediately reciprocated by all of them, except the one who was in a headlock being talked to very sternly about his manners in front of a lady.

 

            “Hi,” Morris tried, awkwardly.

 

            “Hello Morris!” all of them said in clearly coordinated stereo. Morris didn’t have to look round to know that Becker had just paused to slap his face with one hand in despair, and she laughed.

 

            “Have you been practising that?” she asked, taking off her rucksack and wedging it somewhere safe-looking next to Becker’s empty chair.

 

            “Yes,” muttered one of two smartly-dressed young women at a table next to them.

 

            “We’re very sorry, miss,” said the tallest of Beck’s friends, unfolding himself from his seat and giving the complainer the single most charming smile Morris had ever seen on anyone’s face full stop. “It’s just, this is our friend’s best mate, and we’ve been dying to meet her for weeks; we wanted to get it right. Can I buy you ladies a drink to apologise?”

 

            The woman unfroze slightly, but shook her head. “No, we’re going anyway.”

 

            “Such a pity,” the tall man mourned. “I can’t persuade you to stay? I promise we’ll behave.”

 

            Both women laughed. “Charmer,” the spokeswoman accused, with a smile, and then they were gathering up their things and leaving.

 

            “Don’t mind Taffy,” called one of the men, a stocky, puckish-looking blond, at the table to Morris. “He can’t help charming anything in a skirt. Or out of one.”

 

            Morris smiled. “It’s a useful skill. So you’re Taffy?”

 

            The very tall man – Taffy – bowed extravagantly.

 

            “I’ll take that as a yes. And you’re…?”

 

            “Max,” said the man who had told her Taffy’s name, and pointed to a slightly softer-edged copy of himself sitting next to him. “This is my brother, Mark. And that’s Chalky, and there’s Jamil, and Tom, and –”

 

            “Come on, lads,” another one of the men interrupted, standing up. He had possibly the most striking looks Morris had ever seen on a man, tightly-curled reddish brown hair, a long, melancholy face, a thick splattering of freckles, and sepia-coloured skin. He also had a very heavy Scottish accent. Morris felt immediately that although she was likely to forget Taffy’s, Max’s, Mark’s, Chalky’s and Tom’s names, this man’s wouldn’t escape her. “Just because Beck runs off to flirt with the bartender doesn’t mean we can’t have manners.” He pulled a recently-vacated chair over and tucked it in next to the empty one that had been Becker’s. “There. You look like you’ve been on your feet all day.”

 

            “Thanks,” Morris said, smiling at him, and shook hands automatically. “And you are?”

 

            “Neil. Smithy.” He smiled back at her, which made him even more handsome. Morris really hoped he was straight and into short owlish blondes, but it seemed unlikely. “The way Beck tells it, you’re ten feet tall and a superhero.”

 

            Morris laughed and blushed, tucking her hat and gloves into her pockets and unzipping her heavy coat. “Beck’s biased. Is he really flirting with the bartender?”

 

            “Yep,” Smithy said, and then one gingerbread eyebrow went up. “No, better than that…”

 

            Taffy gave a low whistle. “Got his number. Nice work, Beck, get in!”

 

            Morris grinned, hung her coat over the back of her chair, and sat down. “Does this mean I might get a drink soon?”

 

            “Eh,” Taffy said. “Maybe.”

 

            “Fingers crossed,” Smithy said, and smiled at her, stealing Becker’s chair. “Tell us how you know Beck.”

 

            “Yeah,” Max called, “we only know his side of the story.”

 

            Morris settled in, and started to talk.  

 

***

 

            Morris settled in, and started to talk. Becker had sworn on his life that he really did want to hear every last detail of her research, despite the fact that he’d already heard it in every conceivable stage from beginning to end and had read several drafts of it, even the earliest. She sat across from him in the restaurant he’d chosen and talked and talked, making up for how little they were able to speak when he was at Sandhurst, combing her fingers through her long sandy hair and forming and re-forming her plait. Becker listened closely, dark circles under his eyes, but those eyes bright and lively, still with the same new-penny shine that they’d uncovered at Oxford. The army hadn’t killed his smiles, then. Morris was comforted by the thought – as comforted as she was by the intelligent questions he was asking about her research.

 

            “So… yeah,” she finished, when she’d run out of things to say. “And I’ve got a job at a commercial archaeology company and I’m going to work for a while, save up some more before I go for a PhD.”

 

            “That sounds great,” Becker said, and his praise was honest, genuinely happy for her, genuinely interested, and Morris felt a knot that had been tied very tightly in her chest relax.

 

            “Hey, so here’s the heroine of the hour,” said a new voice, lilting brightly on each word, and Taffy and Smithy appeared. “Congratulations on the Master’s,” Taffy added, turning his charming smile on her, “Beck won’t stop talking about it,” and Smithy hugged her and asked about her research and her exams.

 

            Morris told him, told them both, and Becker leant back into his seat and watched, a small, real smile curving at his lips. Smithy listened seriously, as if he really cared; Taffy focused all that charm on her, for a few minutes. Smithy produced a card of congratulations from Becker’s platoon, which contained the scrawled addition to the printed ‘congrats!’ message _we don’t understand half the science, but a degree in hitting people with swords is pretty fucking cool_. Evidently the focus of her research, weaponry as a marker of cultural change, had made it through Becker’s slightly garbled and much-repeated retelling. Enchanted against her will, Morris glowed with the unaccustomed attention.

 

            Becker had orchestrated this, Morris realised, after Taffy and Smithy had gone and their main courses had arrived. He wanted his new friends to be her new friends too, like a kid in the playground cautiously introducing them. Morris smiled as her best friend raised a glass to her, and thought that it was cute of him, and that she forgave him for disappearing into an institution she didn’t understand, and that he was rather sweet, really.

 

            Though it was probably denigrating the solemnity of the occasion to say so.

 

***

 

            It was probably denigrating the solemnity of the occasion to say so, but there was a great deal of metal and pageantry about the place when Becker passed out of Sandhurst. Morris fidgeted through the church service, stood on Freddie’s foot whenever he threatened to fall asleep, and kept craning her neck to see Becker and assess him. She knew Beck thought everything that happened here was important, and that he did really well and people thought highly of him, and that the shouting and bullying was part of a sort of forging process. That didn’t stop her from automatically turning protective and defensive when she found people were pushing Becker around. She had located Becker’s most aggressive instructor, a man called Wilder, in the crowd and had successfully entertained herself for fifteen minutes by staring a hole in the back of his head. But it wasn’t enough. She needed to see _Becker_.

 

            “Well, they certainly all look very smart,” Frieda Morris said placidly when the parade marched into view.

 

            “Mm,” Jack said, and grabbed Freddie by the scruff of his neck. “Godfrey Morris, I swear to God, if I see that Gameboy out again I will lock it in the safe for a _month_.”

 

            “Freddie!” Morris exclaimed, turning on him.

 

            Freddie secreted his Gameboy in an unknown pocket and stared accusingly at his sister. “It’s boring!”

 

            A number of people in the vicinity suddenly found pressing reasons to look the other way or examine the order of service.

 

            “Shut. _Up_ ,” Morris hissed. “This is Beck’s big day. Not yours.” She relented. “Look, this is the interesting bit, and it’s over soon, anyway.”

 

            “Oh,” Freddie said dubiously. “Where’s Beck?”  


            “I don’t know yet.” Morris scanned the moving phalanx of young men and a few women, and eventually picked out Becker by the simple expedient of finding Taffy (all six foot six of him) and Smithy (who was one of only seven or eight men who weren’t white in the entire group) and scanning the rows next to them more closely. “Look, there he is. In front of the really tall one.”

 

            “Oh,” Freddie repeated, and treated Becker’s appearance to a critical examination. “He looks… smart.”

 

            “He’s supposed to,” Morris said.

 

            “I bet nobody made him scrub behind his ears at the sink,” Freddie added, resentfully. A tall, willowy girl wearing a yellow hat in the row in front of them choked on a giggle.

 

            “If you’d washed properly I wouldn’t have done that,” his sister retorted, and she put an arm around his shoulders.

 

            “He looks happy,” Freddie observed clinically.

 

            “He does,” Morris conceded, and rested her cheek against her brother’s (mercifully clean) blond hair. “He’s supposed to.”

 

***

 

            “He’s supposed to be,” Morris said when her younger brother complained that Becker was increasingly distant. “He’s got lots of things he has to do.”

 

            “Dangerous things?” Freddie demanded, resting his chin on the pub’s table.

 

            “Hopefully not,” Morris said, thinking of Beck’s careful plans, the letter addressed to her she wasn’t allowed to read, the will Taffy had witnessed before getting all four of them spectacularly drunk (the solicitor, bowled over by Taffy’s charm and way with a man in a pinstripe suit, had come too). “Practice sort of things.”

 

            “When’s he going?”

 

            “Next week,” Morris said, “and you probably won’t see him again before he goes so say goodbye now, okay?”

 

            “But he’s coming back, right?”

 

            “Not for another six months,” Morris said, dodging the question. Her mother, who would normally have been handling this, was in the ladies’ loos; her father was at a conference, which was why they were eating out in the first place, instead of at home, eating Becker’s favourite meal. Morris watched Beck lounge outside with a cigarette, and cursed the fate that had led them here.

 

            Two days later, she hugged him goodbye at the train station and went back home to work, excavating an Iron Age camp with less than half her heart in it and an unusually sharp tongue for the students ineptly learning to excavate.

 

            Ten days after that, she got her first email from him. _In Afghanistan at last_ , it began.

 

            Morris took a deep breath and started the process of reconciling herself with her best friend’s job, because he’d sounded so _happy_.

 

***

 

            He’d sounded so happy when he’d told her about his promotion. Morris fought bitterness and tried to calm herself, scraping risotto off the bottom of the pan and adding more stock. He’d told her that it meant more danger but more responsibility, and he was looking forward to it.

 

            Becker hadn’t specified which of the two he’d meant – the danger or the responsibility. Morris had deliberately not pushed, knowing that every rung of the ladder he climbed, every accolade he won, was another middle finger in his father’s face as far as Becker was concerned. But now he was lying on Morris’s bed, wide-open bloodshot eyes staring at the ceiling. He’d promised Morris he was going to sleep, and he wasn’t doing it. He couldn’t seem to do it.

 

            This had happened before, Morris told herself, two years ago, when Morris had still been in Durham and Becker had been at Sandhurst. Something had happened, just before the end of term, something Becker still hadn’t told her about, and he’d come straight to her without having slept for three days, glassy-eyed and desperate. It had taken hours of talking to him and soothing him to get him to sleep, but it had worked. It would work now. Soon.

 

            Hopefully soon enough for Morris’s petrified housemates to come out of their rooms and come to terms with the combats on the washing line over the sink, since their anaemic tumbler-dryer had hiccupped to death weeks ago.

 

            Morris tasted the risotto, realised she’d overcooked it, and dished it out crossly. Beck probably wouldn’t notice.

 

            Her phone went off in her pocket and Morris jerked sharply, causing the measuring jug of stock to go flying across the kitchen floor. She swore and went for her phone. Taffy’s name blinked on the screen, and she selected the text.

 

            _Little bird told me B was in a state. U ok?_

 

            By now accustomed to Taffy’s methods of intelligence gathering, Morris merely sent a snippy text back. _Sure u arent supposed 2 know. B a mess. Won’t sleep. Standard response 2 stress._

 

            _I hear it wasnt standard stress_ , Taffy texted back in seconds. _Call 4 reinforcement whenever, Jamil is near you & Floss lives in Bristol._

 

            Floss? Morris asked herself, and then concluded that Floss was probably Taffy’s latest girlfriend. She lost track every now and again. She scrabbled through the messy kitchen to find a biro and wrote the name down on her hand so she could transfer it to her pinboard, then cleaned up the spill on the floor, before picking up two bowls of steaming risotto and some cutlery and carrying them upstairs.

 

            As anticipated, Becker was wide awake, staring up at the ceiling.

 

            “Hey, you,” Morris said gently, and sat down beside him. “I brought food.”  


            Becker moved as if it was agony to him to twitch a muscle. Morris’s heart broke for him. He ate more slowly than he ever had done before, and significantly less than Morris would have said he needed. She didn’t comment, but finished hers and set both bowls aside, stacked them on her bedside table. Beck put his head in her lap and closed his eyes, and she ran her fingers through his inky hair, hoping he would drift off quietly. His hair was perfectly clean and soft, she noticed; he’d been a little grimy around the edges when he’d arrived, carelessly scrubbed, but had immediately disappeared into the shower and proceeded to use a great deal of hot water and half a bottle of shower-gel. Morris refused to hold it against him.

 

            “Talk to me,” Becker murmured through split lips. The lower one had a stitch in.

 

            Morris wavered on the edge of all the things she wanted to say (I love you, thank you for coming home to me, never leave me again, I’m scared, are you still my best friend, how are you planning to face Freddie like this, what happened to you?) “What do you want to talk about?”

 

            “I don’t want to talk,” Becker corrected. “I want you to talk.”

 

            “Demanding sod,” Morris said, and reached blindly out to her bedside table. As luck would have it, she came up with a Lord of the Rings compendium, well-worn and much-loved – but not by Becker, who was a determined fan of films that lacked endless pages of landscape description. “I’ll read to you.”

 

            “Okay,” Becker said peaceably.

 

            Two sentences later, he frowned and opened his mouth.

 

            “Shut up and count hobbits,” Morris said. “Boredom can only help.”

 

            Becker closed his mouth with a snap.

 

            She read for hours as Becker’s breath slowed and evened under her hand on his chest, and new lines smoothed away from his face.

 

            The stars shone bright and hard, no mercy in them.

 

***

 

            The stars shone bright and hard, no mercy in them, and they glittered and prismed through Morris’s tears as she finally squeezed the car into a parking space. The hospital car park was no witness to her failure of moral fibre, dark and semi-deserted, but not without doctors and nurses and patients flitting in and out of the lonely cars parked in it. Not one of them cast Morris even one sideways glance. After a few minutes of gaspy, panicky tears hunched over her steering wheel, Morris fished for tissues in her pockets and blew her nose firmly, wiped her eyes and cleaned her glasses, then stuffed the tissues into the sleeve of her heavy tweed blazer, an allegedly fashionable purchase Taffy’s girlfriend Georgiana had egged her into. It was part of one of the smartest and most respectable outfits she owned, and she sincerely hoped it was going to work its magic now.

 

            She wasn’t supposed to be here, Morris thought as she got out of the car, in several senses of the phrase. She wasn’t supposed to end up entangled with a bunch of army officers; the army had always just been people on the news at home. Still less was she meant to wind up acting as an anchor point for them, even as they anchored her when she needed it. And she definitely wasn’t supposed to be acting as a proxy for a man who had a happy, loving family who really wanted to rush to his succour when he’d had his foot blown off, but were prevented from getting down from Scotland at short notice by late season snow.

 

            Beck was God alone knew where and not responding to the flurries of emails that had shot round their friend group, but it had taken less than an hour to ascertain that Morris was both closest to Selly Oak and had the best chance of getting there in a hurry, and by the time Morris had shot home from the university, bolted some supper and thrown some clothes at a bag, her name, details and a photograph had been passed to Smithy’s CO, who had promptly passed them to the hospital authorities with instructions to expect her whenever she arrived. Morris seriously wondered what the doctors – and more relevantly the nurses – had made of this. Probably not much. She foresaw a certain amount of grovelling and the uttering of blandishments in her future.           

 

            Morris marched into the hospital and straight into the nearest ladies’ loo, where she used the facilities, checked the make-up she had just about managed to apply and straightened her jacket, smartest black jeans, collared shirt and sky-blue jumper nervously. She looked like a mad professor – the thought made her twitch anxiously – and she had giant smears on her glasses. She took them off and cleaned them, then went and found her way to Smithy’s ward.

 

            “Good evening,” Morris said, and suppressed a wince at the actual time, before repeating the speech she had prepared in the car. “I’m here for Neil Smith. I’m a friend of his and his family are stuck in Scotland and can’t get down until the gritters get through. I understand his condition is-” she caught her breath and forced the words out – “very serious.”

 

            “Do you have any idea what time it is?” the ward sister demanded, less angry than shocked.

 

            “Yes,” Morris said fervently. “Believe me. I do. I’m so sorry. But it’s important – Smithy needs someone who knows him by him – if -” Her speech broke down.

 

            “He doesn’t survive the night?” the nurse completed, and eyed her speculatively.

 

            Morris chomped down on the inside of her cheek. She released it when she felt able. “That’s an amazingly straightforward way of putting it. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

 

            The nurse shook her head and patted her on the arm gently, some of the starch going out of her spine. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. Neil Smith will probably pull through, he’s strong and he’s got the best care possible, but you’re right to worry.” She sighed. “If it were only the foot we had to worry about. You must be Aethelflaed Morris.”

 

            Morris winced. “I go by Morris.”

 

            “I can see why.” The nurse handed Morris something that looked like a thin blue hazmat suit and made her wash her hands three times, before handing her a pair of gloves and shoe coverings. Morris pulled all these items on and then rustled into the ICU after the nurse, who looked far easier and more comfortable in exactly the same gear.

 

            “In here,” the nurse said softly, pulling back a curtain with a rattle of rings. The figure in the bed did not react, though Smithy had always been a light sleeper. “I go off-shift in a couple of hours. If you’re not out of here by then, I’ll come and fetch you, do you understand? They’ve arranged a compassionate room for you but you need to use it.”

 

            “Thank you,” Morris whispered, eyes fixed on Smithy, and the nurse left her alone.

 

            Morris took a few hesitant steps towards Smithy, and stood looking down at him. He was perfectly silent and perfectly still, the sepia of his face leached to speckled eggshell, his wide mouth a tight line. He didn’t stir when Morris touched his cheek and forehead; even through her gloves his skin burned with fever. Drips led into the soft crook of his elbow and machines beeped softly around him.

 

            Morris drew up a chair and regarded him with eyes that were threatening to spill over with tears again. She willed them away and cleared her throat. “I’m sorry you’ve been alone, Smithy,” she said unsteadily. “It’s me, Morris. I’m here now. It’s all right.”

 

***

           

            “It’s all right,” Smithy said, standing on one foot at the back door, and stared mordantly at the dark hill above. “There’s no way I could make it up there like this, and I can’t go anywhere on that prosthetic again today. I’d slow you down, anyway.”

 

            “I’ll carry you,” Becker said.

 

            Smithy laughed, but it was only half a joke. “Get on with you.” He gave Morris a one-armed hug, his other hand gripping the doorframe tightly for balance. “Put an extra match into the bastard’s face for me, Morris.”

 

            Morris hugged him back and nodded into his jumper, and she, Taffy and Becker headed out. All three of them were laden down, Morris and Becker with the bags of fuel and Taffy with the kit to start a fire, and they went slowly out of the back gate and across the lane to the field. When Morris glanced back, Smithy was still watching them, standing in the pool of light in the door.

 

            “You’re sure nobody will ask questions?” Becker said to Taffy, who nodded as they clambered over the stile.

 

            “I know everyone around here,” Taffy said, Welsh accent heavier than usual, but managing to sound calm and casual. Smithy had sounded calm, but not casual, and Becker was barely managing either. He had been vibrating with anger since Morris had finally told the whole truth about the last few months of her PhD, and Morris was very glad they had elected to meet at Taffy’s home, not at her parents’ house or her own flat near CMU, which was in any case now let to somebody else. She couldn’t have stood it if her housemates or her family knew what had happened. Taffy and Smithy knowing was bad enough, but at least she was sure – after several years’ experience of their failings, foibles, and strengths – that neither would talk or judge her.

 

            She kept this to herself. Not only was it an unflattering way to talk in front of her friends, but it might also lead to another infuriated explosion from Becker, who was going to have to be kept away from Professor Redford for the foreseeable future.

 

            Not that that was likely to prove difficult.

 

            Morris moved more slowly than either of the men, so was several paces behind Taffy as she followed him up the hill. Becker kept pace with her, head down, but she knew those conker-bright eyes were flicking to her every second or so, and the little crease between his eyebrows certainly wasn’t brought on by exertion.

 

            Morris sniffled.

 

            Taffy turned, and Becker lifted his head and answered a question that hadn’t been asked yet. “She’s fine.”

 

            “She’s the cat’s mother,” Morris said tartly, and added untruthfully: “I have a cold.”

 

            “Have a tissue,” Taffy said, fishing one from his pocket with his good hand. He’d joked earlier that his house was a house of invalids: himself, recovering from a torn ligament in his arm, and Smithy, staying with his family for the relative closeness to his physio and the comfort of being among friends. Morris visited regularly, and so did the others, when they could make it.

 

            “Thanks,” Morris said. She wiped her eyes with it, and kept walking.

 

            They stopped halfway up the hill, where there was a shallow depression in the ground.

 

            “Here,” Taffy said.

 

            “You’re sure nobody is going to mind us setting this on fire?” Becker demanded.

 

            “Beck,” Taffy said patiently. “My parents own the field. We have bonfires here all the time.”

 

            Morris played her torch over the shallow depression, and noted that it was bare of grass and lined with rocks. She knelt down and emptied the bag she carried into its centre very carefully, so that none of the fragments of cardboard or plywood, the glossy photographs or index cards, escaped. Becker set down the second bag of fuel next to her, but she ignored it. It was this that she cared about.

 

            “Here,” Becker said, crouched down beside her, and helped her shape the fuel into something resembling a fire, adding twists of newspaper and firelighters and the remains of an old chair that Taffy’s mother had given them, saying that if they were going to build a bonfire they might as well be thorough and useful about it. Then he stood up, drew her back, and nodded at Taffy, who applied a frankly excessive amount of petrol to the bonfire, and handed Morris a box of matches with a flourish.

 

            Becker frowned at Morris. “It’s a good thing you cut your hair. Mind you don’t set your fringe on fire.”

 

            The first match caught and flared out in the wind. Morris swore and lit another. “I don’t set my hair on fire in the forge, Becker. Don’t teach your grandmother to suck eggs.” She flicked the second match into the pile, and it caught and flamed on a piece of newspaper. For luck, she lit two more and dropped them in, and then one of the firelighters went up with a whoosh and the petrol caught, and Morris watched the painstaking network of friends she had built throughout her PhD go up in smoke.

 

            She could hear somebody laughing, gasping, hysterical sobs, and only realised when Becker put his arms around her waist from behind and rested his head against hers, cuddling her silently, that she was the one laughing.

 

            This was the upside to having friends with horrible, dangerous jobs, Morris realised, the fire glinting in her sight. When you went off the rails, they didn’t flinch. Her laughter came to a juddering, sputtering stop, and she found some balance in her breathing again, so it was no longer quite so harsh. Becker felt able to let her go, tousle her hair and straighten her collar, as if he thought he could restore order to her mind by restoring it to her clothing.

 

            They stayed there for half an hour, while the board burnt down to ashes; Taffy kicked them vindictively, and Morris smiled at him, but it wobbled. Becker watched the embers burn with a narrow look in his eyes, dark and implacable.

 

            Morris concentrated on not crying too much.

 

***

 

            Morris concentrated on not crying too much and putting one foot in front of the other. The hospital felt as endless and impersonal as the one she had visited Smithy in, and Morris was tired and wobbly. Finding her way back to Becker’s room was a major challenge.

 

            “I came as soon as I could,” Taffy said, appearing from nowhere.

 

            Morris jumped several feet in the air and slopped hot coffee all over her hand. “Taffy! I didn’t know you were coming.”

 

            He wrapped his arms around her, a procedure that never failed to make her feel pocket-sized, since Taffy was built like a giraffe. “You’re not answering your phone. Surely you knew somebody would come?”

 

            “I knew,” Morris said, wiping her hand on her hoodie. “I knew. I just…” She shrugged.

 

            “It’s okay,” Taffy told her, and ruffled her short sandy hair. Her thick fringe fell into her eyes, and she forked it out again with her fingers. “How is he? It sounds pretty bad.”

 

            Morris took a deep breath. “They think he’ll live. They say he’ll keep the leg if he does.”

 

            “And?” Taffy said gently, one hand on the middle of her back steering her towards the correct ward for reasons best known to himself. She knew perfectly well where she was going.

 

            “If he’s lucky, he’ll get back full fitness.”

 

            “That’s good. That’s very good.” Taffy chivalrously opened the door to Becker’s private room for her. “Major Ryan made it sound like he was done for.”

 

            Morris swallowed hard to stop coffee coming up with the bile in the back of her throat. “What does he know? What does any of them know about Beck?” A flash of temper lit in the pit of her chest. “For God’s sake. They don’t even like him!”

 

            “I think they like him,” Taffy said, cool rather than gentle now, and Morris appreciated it. “They just didn’t know they’d got used to him until they thought he was about to kick the bucket. Beck’s not always an easy man to appreciate, and I get the sense things are pretty tough, whatever they do on that special assignment.”

 

            Morris laughed and snorted and choked on her coffee. Taffy produced a tissue and a plastic chair from nowhere. Morris stopped choking, sat down and wiped her face. “You have _no_ idea.”

 

            “But you do?” Taffy scrubbed his hands with hand-gel, then moved to Becker’s bedside and stood over him for a few moments, the ivory face blandly handsome and pasty without animation, the silvery white scar through his dark eyebrows shining faintly in the clinical light. Taffy frowned down at him, and then the frown turned into a resigned curl of a smile and one of his oversized hands brushed Becker’s forehead gently, like a blessing, pushing a lock of Becker’s black hair off his forehead.

 

            “Not much of a one,” Morris said truthfully. She had no idea what the things she’d found in the archaeology building were, and she’d only wounded one out of sheer dumb luck. It had left the students alone, though, screamed and run away, and mostly what Morris remembered was the terror that it would bring another one back, the surprise at how good it felt to swing one of her swords for real, and the self-recriminations for the fact that she’d left her chainmail at home. She hadn’t expected to need it. Why would you?

 

            She changed the subject, anyway. “How did you know to come here? I haven’t… I wasn’t really holding it together earlier, and I didn’t think Sarah had called any of you.” She risked a glance at her watch. “Also, Taffy, it’s five in the morning. We’re in Exeter. You live in _Catterick_. How did you get here?”

 

            “Long and surprising story,” Taffy said, moving to stand behind her and laying his hands experimentally on her shoulders. “Are you cold?”  


            Morris shook her head.

 

            “Take off your hoodie, you’re tense as hell. Beck would kill me for leaving you in this state.”

 

            Morris set down her coffee and obeyed. “How’s Georgiana, by the way? I meant to ask. Beck was supposed to but he forgot, and –” Her voice trembled, and she felt her lower lip go.

 

            “Don’t slouch,” Taffy said reprovingly, slapping her back lightly. She straightened with a grumble and a mutter, and several vertebrae shrieked in protest. “And don’t hunch your shoulders either. Christ, academics. Anyway, it’s Jake, not Georgiana, Georgiana and I broke up _weeks_ ago.”

 

            “Oh. Jake. Noted.” Morris’s eyes slid shut and then squeezed tightly as Taffy’s thumbs dug mercilessly into her shoulders. “Ow!”

 

            “Let yourself go,” Taffy said, an admonition rather than a sweet instruction. “Would you rather I tell you about Jake, or about how I got here?”

 

            “Both. Not at once. Ouch!”

 

            “Baby.” Taffy laid the flat of one hot hand on the spot he’d just brutally removed a knot from, soothing it. There had to be benefits to having a core temperature that could melt a toaster, Morris reflected. “I met one of Beck’s colleagues when he got sick. Ditzy?”

 

            “Heard of him. Haven’t met him.” Morris shifted. “Oh, no, except – yes, I have met him, I remember.”

 

            “He remembered me,” Taffy said. “Don’t _wriggle_. He remembered my regiment, too. Had Major Ryan ring around looking for me, because he said you needed support. Why aren’t you tapped into the wives and girlfriends group here? None of us is close enough to you to get you help if something like this happens.”

 

            “Er,” Morris said blankly. “I… don’t know. I just…” She paused fruitlessly, then shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re my friends, Beck’s my friend, Sarah’s my friend. I’m not short of support.”

 

            “You can always use more. Is that better?”

 

            “You’re not sticking your thumbs into my spine, it’s better by default.” Nonetheless, Morris closed her eyes and leant back into Taffy’s touch; he really did have a gift, when he wasn’t trying to dissect your back muscles with his thumbs. “Which girlfriend taught you to do back-rubs? I’ve forgotten.”

 

            “Shoshannah. Why?”

 

            “I should send her flowers. Are you still friends?”

 

            “I went to her wedding last year.” Taffy sighed. “Promise me you’ll get in touch with them. Not Shoshannah, the WAGs.”

 

            “I like the friends I’ve got,” Morris temporised.

 

            Taffy rubbed circles into her neck. “We like you too, Morris.”

 

            Morris let her head drop forward, giving him more skin to work on, and twitched as he poked a bundle of nerves harder than was strictly necessary. “Taffy?”

 

            “Yeah?”

 

            “He’s going to wake up, right?”

 

            “Of course he is,” Taffy said. “He’s going to be fine.”  
 


End file.
